I've been doing the home-cooked pasta thing again. It's a slightly more advanced cuisine of the two stuffed pastas, ravioli and tortellini, and I'm mixing up the sauce, alternating with quattro formaggi and curry. It worked! it's pretty good. It's a simple to prepare, hearty meal. Pesto looks ugly, but it tastes good and fresh.
We didn't cycle out of Paris all the way to Versailles, which is what I initially thought we were going to do. Instead, we took an express train somewhere into the neighbourhood of Versailles, and picked up our bicycles from a little underground garage. Well, even with the shorter cycle to the Chateau, we would end up doing enough of the bicycle for the day. So at first we had breakfast at a nearby market, where the bakery had the most delicious Feuillette Jambon Fromage, which I think loosely means pastry with pork and cheese. I would bet a reasonable amount of money that it had lard plastered on the crust - that crust was so wonderfully browned and tasty. After getting lunch - I bought stewed eggplant with minced beef and a quiche - we headed out to the nearby gardens to the Chateau, as well as the grounds and apartments which lodged the royal mistress.
For the group's picnic lunch, we sat at a shaded spot along a huge canal, a cross shaped monstrosity of a canal. It was as far as the eye could see from the Chateau grounds and out over the canal, it was breathtaking. With lunch, some of us took a little nap, others chilled around and chatted. Unfortuntately, we couldn't get wine into the Chateau grounds. I went around the canal on the bicycle, and it took me twenty minutes, so it had to be two kilometres long by one wide. That was a lot of water for a canal. Our guides for the day said that it took half of France's total GDP to turn out that Chateau and its grounds, which is of course, completely insane. But that was France in the glory days under Louis XIV. Apparently, it needed more water than the city of Paris. Well, on the whole it didn't really commend itself to me, it was just too grandiose, too ostentatious, and to my mind, fairly unimaginative. Maybe I'm ignorant of its architects and artists, but to my amateur eye they don't seem to be of the calibre of the Florentines. Well, the citizens of Paris didn't take too fondly to all its trappings and comforts either, as they stormed it while Louis XV hid in it in 1789.
The tour was okay enough on the whole. I went back to the apartment for pasta with pesto, and decided to head out for a nice easy run before going to another jazz club. I hadn't run in two weeks! The evening was pretty inviting, a little cool and breezy. Well, I ended up running past some fields somewhere towards the river Seine, and some guys were playing touch rugby. They were short a man, so I asked to join and they were cool with it. So yeah, I had a lovely time playing. They were real rugby players as well. It was a beautiful rosy pink sunset evening, with the golden dome of the Musée de l'Armée behind us, and some of the heritage buildings around us, there was a good breeze, and the game was hard and friendly. It's beautiful, like the Padang, but more European.
I bought some moussaka at the store - eggplant, cheese, beef, tomato, etc. - potato and ham salad, and yoghurt with passionfruit, to heat up with the microwave in the apartment. Box wine as well, to round off supper. Well, that didn't have much soul in it, but it was okay. I got a big box of wine for six euro, and I'm going to try and drink enough to put a small dent in it. It was cheap, and from being in Australia, I know box wine is generally decent even if it seems really cheap.
Okay, gonna head to the Picasso museum and the Louvre tomorrow. The guides earlier today said that it was going to be crazy busy at the Louvre, and since it was open till nine forty-five pm, it was no point heading there early at nine am. Fair enough.
Well, I'm beat. I've really enjoyed all the apartments I've stayed in so far, so I'm definitely well in favour of the airbnb thing; since hotels would have been twice as expensive. It's nice to think of it now, but I've been rather fortunate on this trip so far. Well, goodnight, folks.
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I spent (in EUR):
135 - Chateau de Versailles tour
11 - pastry, quiche, aubergine
8 - store groceries
52 - apartment in Duroc
